Georgina Nugent

I joined UCC as a Lecturer in Modernism in January 2025. My research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, with particular interest in literary modernism, modernist visual art, life writing, repetition, translation, and literary style.

I completed my BA in English at Trinity College Dublin, where I was elected a Trinity Scholar, and awarded the Trinity Gold Medal. I remained at Trinity for the duration of my IRC-funded PhD, awarded in 2016. I also hold a second PhD from the University of Antwerp, awarded in 2020. These doctoral theses served as the starting points for the two monographs I have published to date:

The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company/ Compagnie (Bloomsbury Academic/ UPA, 2021) conducts a detailed, bilingual genetic study of how Beckett planned, wrote, revised, and subsequently translated his late prose masterpieces Company, and its French equivalent Compagnie. It will (eventually) be accompanied by a bilingual, digital genetic edition.

Beckett and Stein (Cambridge UP, 2023) was the first extended comparative study of Gertrude Stein’s role in the development of Beckett’s aesthetics. It redresses the major critical lacuna that is Stein's role and influence on Beckett’s nascent bilingual aesthetics of the late 1930s. 

Prior to my appointment at UCC, I was a H2020-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. I then spend four and a half years at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich as an Assistant Professor of Modern English Literature. This was followed by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Vienna.

I am a queer, neurodivergent scholar and my pronouns are she/they.

My research to date has largely focused on critically interrogating neglected historiographic and stylistic connections between modernist women authors and their (often more commercially successful) male peers. I am particularly interested in the figures that orbited, enabled, competed with, or were occluded by Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. I am also very interested in how writers write, revise, rewrite, and conceptualise their work.

My current research project focuses on James Joyce and Gertrude Stein’s literary rivalry and competing modernisms. This research was funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, and I am presently preparing it for publication as a monograph study.

Beyond my ongoing preoccupation with Stein, I am interested in the broader constellations of women who surrounded Beckett and Joyce. I have endeavoured to redress these biographical lacunae and instances of critical neglect through increasingly collaborative interventions staged with my scholarly peers. I edited a landmark special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies that focused on “Beckett’s Women Contemporaries” (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and am presently co-editing (with Ronan Crowley) a special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies that examines the women in James Joyce’s network of contemporaries. I have also co-organised (with Ronan Crowley) a series of conferences on the topic of “Joyce’s Women Contemporaries”, and “Corrective Life Writing”.

I serve on the Editorial Board of the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today / Aujhourd’hui.

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD students or postdoctoral researchers whose research interests align with mine.

[Total funding recieved as of February 2026: €330,945]

Undergraduate teaching

Lectures

EN1103 – Problems in Literature

EN1011 – Literature in Time

EN3077 – The Irish Literary Revival and Irish Modernisms

EN3108 – Modernism

Seminars

EN2003 – Queer Modernisms

EN3003 – Samuel Beckett’s Post-war Prose

EN3003 – Relational Beckett

Dissertation Supervision

Postgraduate teaching

2025-26

EN6024 – Ireland and Modernity

EN6025 – Literary and Cultural Modernisms

EN6028 – Theories of Modernity

Dissertation Supervision